This is a light storygame using the Apocalypse World Engine to tell tales of giant monsters who terrorize the Earth but also just happen to save the human race from an even worse threat in the process!
You take on the roles of the kaiju in this game, going about your own business of seeking food, shelter and a mate, when disaster strikes! In getting back to the normal order of your lives, you inadvertently find yourselves becoming the heroes, though you may never be aware of what you’ve done. Play your monster as a pawn in the story, using them to achieve the goals that you want, by using them to stomp, steal or investigate the story’s obstacles.
The download includes twelve different monster playsheets:
The Avian: a giant flying creature.
The Bug: a giant insect.
The Critter: a giant mammal.
The Crustacean: a giant crab or lobster.
The Digger: a giant burrower.
The Glob: a giant mess.
The Lizard: a giant scaly creature.
The Mech: a giant robot.
The Plant: a giant vegetable.
The Simian: a giant ape-like creature.
The Swarm: a giant colony life-form.
The Unspeakable: a giant horror.
There are also two other files:
Monster Force Terra: the core rule booklet, a mere 10 pages long, including tips for the MC on running the game.
Reference Sheet: print this on the back of the playsheets.
got the Printer’s proof for my new book today! Lonely World! It’s going to need a few tiny revisions, and then this thing will be ready and available for purchase!
This is still very unfinished, but if you want to have a peak at my progress with the Rules, Origins and Styles for my superheroes game, here it all is.
There are big chunks missing from this, but I’m hoping to make a lot more progress with it this week.
Epiphany time! (Either that or spending the last few days rewriting Origins and Styles has distorted my sense of values.)
I haven’t really been sure what to do with the equivalent of sex moves in this superhero hack: I thought I might use them set up situations like the classic Fastball Special, so you have to co-operate with another hero to benefit from a particular tactic, but the idea didn’t excite me that much.
I went back to considering the soap opera side of the story and putting sex moves back in, but that didn’t sit right with me either, it felt like the wrong kind of intimacy… then it just hit me.
When you entrust someone else with your secret identity…
Now, this doesn’t just trigger when you reveal your secret identity to someone else, but when you entrust them with it, that is you request their aid in keeping up the charade of your double life. This also doesn’t mean that your secret can only be exposed once, since you can always obfuscate the truth after it gets revealed.
Also, I have totally finished writing style moves for all the Styles now, unless I think up another Style, but as there are already 15 of those, they combine with the 14 Origins to make 210 possible ‘playbooks.’ That’s probably enough to be going on with.
The long slog continues. Recently a couple things helped me dial in the focus of Remannt. The most important was a conversation about my process for drawing and sketching. Nominally I’m a happy artist, but lately I’ve been doing some soul searching and I’m realizing how hard it can be to see something to fruition. I found myself outlining the stages of creation, beginning with a swell of the oncoming idea, followed by the burning passion of the work, which at some point flips and becomes almost painful as you push to finish a design. Then once it’s complete there’s this void in you, something that filled and animated you to such a frenzy is gone now and you become listless. That feeling can be eased with some ego boosting “wows” and some “good jobs” but eventually that need to make something creeps up and you’re compelled into the dance again.
That’s what Remnant is. It’s not a game I want to experience, it’s something I want to subject people to. It’s a creative drive simulator from my perspective of the act, and the emotional rollercoaster involved.
Here’s the current review of the resource loop of the game based on those feelings and goal:
Remnant Color Wheel
+Feel the Gnaw – The empty hunger has overcome the body and it casts about for some color to ease the pain and distract it from the Ruin.
+Consume Color – Consuming color flushes a body and makes it luminous. The brighter a body is the higher quality of the the color they’ve imbibed. For a time holding color will ground a body and enable them to face the Ruin with confidence. The higher quality the color, the more unflappable the surety. As time goes on however the color will inevitably begin to burn.
+Holding Color – If a body has any tint inside the color will invariably ignite it, making every problem sound like a threat or challenge. As the burn grows the desire to solve these slights, real and imagined, with immediate and unrestrained aggression becomes more and more appealing. Hold the Color too long and a body becomes a structure fire, a smog huffing avatar of the Dragon’s fury personified.
+Color Types – All color from the Ruin begins mixed with tint. This unrefined color is referred to as Crude. Once the tint has been strained out by a human vessel the color glows brightly, is a feast for the senses, and is referred to as Pure.
-Crude Color – This color appears like a thick, gloppy paint. It glows faintly but is mixed with ropes of tarry, black tint. It adds to a body’s total tint when imbibed.
-Pure Color – Eases all pangs and burns the same way Crude Color does, however it can burn off tint as it does so.
-Pure & Crude – Both burn a body, both can impart a memory, and both can whisper something true, but pure color will do these things more intensely.
+Expell Color – Color burns the holder so it has to be expelled from a body eventually. Uncreative souls expell it as Salve Water, a weak sauce color substitute. Creative souls can invest it into objects of a specific nature, but investing can cost a memory.
+Hollowed Out – Once the color is expelled the body will begin to feel the empty howl of the Ruin rising again. Tint is left behind, but without the color to ignite it it merely smolders. When hollowed out a player’s affectation becomes an important support. Playing to it, and having others buy into your personal lie eases the yawn. The presence of others who are flush can slightly ease the empty feeling, but the more tint they have inside the more that cold comfort is just that, a reminder of what you don’t have. That emptiness needs to be filled or it will overwhelm a body and they’ll become a hungry ruinbirth).
I showed this to a friend of mine and he suggested that maybe AW isn’t the game I should be hacking at. Suggesting both Inspectors and Don’t Rest Your Head as options. I’m not ready to walk away from the Apocalypse Engine just yet, I’m a huge fan of its specific responses for moves and events, but he’s right when he says I lack the skills to understand the nuance of those systems enough to create my own expression of them.
For reading this far here’s some post-it sketches as thanks.
Which PbtA setting lends itself best to a darker Men-in-Black/Fringe style game – group of Agents vs inexplicable…
Which PbtA setting lends itself best to a darker Men-in-Black/Fringe style game – group of Agents vs inexplicable supernatural darkness? I feel like MotW would work well, but you’d have to throw out a lot of playbooks (or reskin then). What about Urban Shadows? I don’t own it, but I thought it was more werewolves and vampires than the sort of “weird fiction” bits I’d like.
